“You get me out! You get me out right now!”
I sat back on my heels, grinning.
And then I got him out.
The good news, we discovered, was that the main corridors had a few lanterns still flickering here and there, which my slowly returning vision found helpful. The bad news was they weren’t corridors anymore. Beams, and in some cases whole walls, had come down in our path, some of which I could climb over, but some of which were as tall as what remained of the ceiling, forcing me to backtrack. Or, in the cases where I could see past them, to shift.
Only that wasn’t going so great.
“All right,” Rosier said, sometime later. “Once more. It was just around here.”
I shook my head, staring at the latest blockage and holding on to the wall for support. “I can’t.”
“You have to.” The place shuddered again, the walls trembling harder now, like they’d been doing for the last couple of minutes. Because this wasn’t a pass through to Faerie as I’d halfway expected. It wasn’t a pass through to anything. According to Rosier, it was the magical equivalent of a Winnebago, a portable palace fey nobles took with them when they traveled so they didn’t have to live like peasants.
It was carved out of a portal, something about looping it back in on itself to make a stable pocket—or whatever. I didn’t get all of it. But I did get that said portal had been damaged when Pritkin blasted through it. And then again when the wacked-out princess started ripping the fey a new one. And now it was trying to collapse on us, and apparently bad things happened to you when you were inside a portal that collapsed.
But I still couldn’t. I’d been reduced to doing line-of-sight minishifts, the very easiest kind, but I was out. I was out of those, I was out of everything, I wasn’t going to be doing a damn thing without drinking the last of my joy juice, and I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t, even if the rest of the ceiling came down on my head!
“What are you doing?” Rosier demanded.
“You said it’s just through here, right?”
“Yes, but—I didn’t mean through through!” he said, as I started digging my way forward, as dirt and debris tumbled down on our heads, as I struggled to breathe with lungs that were already caked with dust, as Rosier cursed and rocks fell and my hands kept digging and then clawing at the earth, which just went on and on.
Until another tremor shook us.
And this one was about a seven on the Richter scale, causing dust to billow and walls to crack and the floor to start bucking wildly under our feet. And the wall of earth in front of me, a previously impenetrable mass, to cascade away, like an avalanche down a mountainside. One that took us with it.
Rosier and I half stumbled, half slid out the other side, and then I grabbed him and ran for the portal, wishing the damn dirt hadn’t mostly blinded me again.
And then really wishing it when we splashed down into a freezing lake of water, almost over my head.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I went under, just from the sheer shock, and came up gasping. And then gasped some more when we were almost run down. I’d been inside ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but everything had changed.
People were wading and swimming through what had to be a five-foot surf. And there was nothing to impede them now, since the only thing left of the little house was the wall holding the portal. And then not even that when it flared out behind us, causing me to duck as fiery bits flew over my head and the wall crumbled to dust.
Like the palisade, which was now just a few smoking piles of logs, crackling with whatever remained of the ward. Which probably explained why the once orderly camp was a working anthill of people, running, splashing, and scampering through the burning remains, making for the hills. And the fey weren’t doing much to stop them; they barely even seemed to notice.
For good reason, I thought, staring upward.
Holy shit.
“What the hell is that?” Rosier screeched, sounding outraged.
I didn’t answer. Like the fey, I was kind of busy. Watching the battle of the ages take place in the air above us.
Or, to be more accurate, a battle of the air—and water, and lightning, and fire, all of which were getting tossed around like . . . like things that get tossed around, I thought, my brain pretty much fried at this point. But it didn’t matter, because how did you describe that?
At its simplest, it was two women, standing on opposite hills in the open land behind the camp. Two dark-haired women with long raven tresses whipping around their heads as they faced off, although that kind of missed the point. The point being what was happening all around them.
I watched as what looked like a hurricane filled the skies, and as tornadoes snaked down, a dozen at a time, snatching men off their feet and sending them flying. As others ignited, turning the burning cinders of campfires into roaring maelstroms of heat and light, which tore through the army on the hillsides and cleaved red veins across the countryside. And as still more filled with water, one of which encapsulated three fey who had almost snuck up behind the princess, dragging them off the hill and threatening to drown them midair.
But they weren’t dragging off Nimue.
A mighty rush of wind boiled around her, an impossible-to-defy act of nature that was nonetheless being defied.